OverView

Large and medium sized businesses use disparate applications to run their business and one of the major areas that need to converge amongst these applications is the Accounting, Financial and Inventory information. Tally being the default accounting, Inventory and Statutory Compliance software used by enterprises in these segments. Therefore the need arises to discuss on the Integration Capabilities of Tally. Integration Solutions are designed to ensure that the existing investments in Software (ERP, Legacy and other Enterprise systems) remain intact by seamlessly integrating information with new systems, technologies and custom applications within the enterprise, as well as with companies with whom the business deals with.

Need and Benefits of Integration

To meet the challenges of the new business environment, information systems need to communicate with each other as seamlessly as possible, provide right-time visibility of transactions across the entire enterprise and be flexible enough to accommodate the changing structure of the business. When more and more information needs to be shared across traditional business boundaries, the way you integrate your systems and processes is rapidly becoming one of the most important priorities in business today. The following figure gives a complete perspective on the overall Integration Capabilities of Tally.ERP 9

Tally Interfaces – For Integration

Tally communicates with the external world mainly using two Interfaces.

·Tally ODBC Interface (Read Only)

·Tally API Interface (Read and Write)

Tally ODBC Interface (Read Only)

ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) makes it possible to access data from any application, regardless of which Database Management System (DBMS) is handling the data. ODBC manages this by inserting a middle layer, called a database driver between an application and the DBMS. The purpose of this layer is to translate the application's database queries into commands that the DBMS can understand. For this to function, both the application and the DBMS must be ODBC compliant i.e., the application must be capable of issuing ODBC commands and the DBMS must be capable of responding to them.

Tally provides the ODBC Interface which makes it possible for applications to talk to Tally Database. By using this interface, external applications will be able to retrieve data from Tally. Tally acts as a Server delivering Data to external applications Using the ODBC Interface, Tally.ERP 9 can make ODBC calls to an External Database and retrieve data from them. In such a case Tally acts as a Client to pull Data from disparate Data Sources. This data can be consumed in Tally as per requirement

Fusion Tally API Interface (Read and Write)

API (Application Program Interface) is the standard for information exchange with external systems. Tally.ERP 9 supports standardized message formats for Read/Write. Tally.ERP 9 can communicate with any environment capable of Writing and reading with Fusion TallyAPI.

Tally can act as an DB Server capable of receiving an API Request and responding with an API Response. The entire Tally Data can be made available to the requesting application. It is also possible for the application to store data into Tally Database.

Using the same interface, Tally has the capability to interact with a Web Service delivering Data over HTTP. In this scenario, Tally behaves as a client retrieving and storing data into an external database. The Web Service capable of handling Tally Read/Write serves as a layer between Tally and External Database.

Integration Using Tally API Interface

ON THE COMPLETION OF THIS CHAPTER YOU WILL BE ABLE TO

Understand the functionality of Tally as a Server using External applications

Introduction Tally.ERP 9 has supported integration with web scripting languages such as ASP/Perl/PHP and other languages like VB or any environment capable of supporting API and HTTP. Integration with these products is possible as API import and export capability is built into TallyAPI functionality

In fact, Tally.ERP 9 delivers most of the functionalities of Web Services provided by Micro-soft's.NET framework. All Tally.ERP 9 data is accessible to any number of potentially disparate systems through the use of Internet standards such as API and HTTP.

In other words, Tally.ERP 9 can communicate with any environment capable of sending and receiving API over HTTP. This chapter explains how Tally.ERP 9 will act as a server/client while it is connecting to external applications. The following figure shows the API OOPS Messaging Format through external application, acting Tally.ERP 9 as a Server/Client